Red Horseman

by Stephen Coonts

  “Sir, we’ve got to do something about this,” Toad said with a slight edge in his voice.

  “What is this evidence of?” Jake gestured toward the photo. “What?” That was the nub of it. At best this photo might destroy one alibi. “We’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Do you think the CIA killed Keren?” Toad asked.

  “I have no idea. If the Mossad knows and wanted us to believe, they could have given us real proof. They didn’t. Which raises another question—is Farrell still working for the Mossad?”

  Toad spent several seconds processing it. “I can’t see her working for anyone else. She…”

  Toad ran out of steam when Jake Grafton gave him one of those cold glances. With thinning hair and a nose a tad too large, Jake Grafton’s face wasn’t memorable. It was just another face among the throng. Until he fixed those gray eyes on you with one of those looks that could freeze water, that is—then you got a glimpse of the hard, determined man inside.

  “Maybe they wanted to smear Herb,” Toad added lamely.

  “That’s one possibility. Another is that they want to discredit me.”

  “You?”

  “I’m not going to be around here very long if I sally forth to slay a dragon armed with nothing but a peashooter and one pea. You see that? The dragon will fry my britches. And if there’s no dragon I just immolated myself.”

  Jake rooted in his desk drawer for a pack of matches. He found them, then dumped the trash from his wastecan onto the floor. One by one he lit the prints and dropped them into the gray metal wastecan. The negative went last. When the celluloid was consumed, Jake picked up the trash and tossed it back into the can.

  Then he picked up a file on the Russian army and opened it. Several minutes later Toad remembered the computer printout of the front page of the London Times that was inside his pocket. He wadded it up and tossed it into the classified burn bag.

  3

  June in Washington is very similar to early summer in any other large city in the northeastern part of the United States. The days of clouds and rain come regularly, interspersed with periods of sunshine and balmy breezes, perfect days when it seems the whole world is ripe, flourishing, vibrantly alive. Weekends are for shopping expeditions, yard work, an occasional party.

  Workdays in the nation’s capital begin here like everywhere else. Most people turn on one of the television morning shows as they dress and drink a cup of hot chocolate or coffee. While they take a quick squint at the morning newspaper and gobble a fat pill, Willard Scott tells them about the weather and a lady having her hundredth birthday. Why supposedly sane people choose to spend the worst moments of the day with Willard Scott, Bryant Gumbel and their colleagues on the other networks is a phenomenon that will probably intrigue archeologists of a future age.

  With the kids shoved out the door to swimming lessons or other summer activities, working people fire up their horseless chariots and join the commuting throng. Tooling out of the subdivision they tune in another set of fools on their car radios. On each of the morning “drive shows” one or two jaded disk jockeys and one syrupy sweet, eternally cheerful female crank out some combination of pop music, weather and crude humor interspersed with reports from a helicopter pilot about the traffic jams that form every morning around stalls, wrecks and road construction projects. This mix is occasionally enlivened with a blow-by-blow account of a spectacular police chase of a freeway speeder who suddenly remembered his thirty-two unpaid parking tickets when he saw the cop’s flashing light.

  And “news,” lots of it. Usually “news” is presented in short snippets, “sound bites,” some of them worth the ten seconds of air time they get, most not. To prevent the working citizen creeping through traffic from getting too down from an overdose of reality, the producers of these shows leaven the mix with the inane doings of show business celebrities and the latest risqué tidbits from the court trials of current cretins. Nothing heavy, nothing in depth, just a once-over-lightly on items that would only interest a heavy metal groupie or a social scientist from planet Zork.

  Jake Grafton never listened. Callie had the television going every morning while she fixed Amy’s breakfast, but Jake read the newspaper. If the Washington Post thought an international story was worth the front page, the American intelligence community was going to be wrestling with it before lunch.

  In the car Jake turned off the radio the instant it babbled to life. Amy and Callie always left the squawk box on, he always turned it off.

  Today he drove in the usual blessed silence while he reviewed the crises of yesterday and the likely flaps on today’s agenda. The Middle East was boiling again: another assassination, more riots protesting ongoing Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, more terrorism and murder. Chaos in the Balkans, another wave of Haitians heading for Florida, the usual anarchy in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, or as the bureaucrats had labeled it, the CIS—all in all, this was just another day in the 1990s.

  Normally there was little the Americans could do to improve any international situation. Nor, as the optimists noted, was there much they could do that would make things worse. Still everything had to go through the gristmill and be forwarded on to the policymakers for their information. And in the case of the DIA, to the appropriate units of the military to ensure they weren’t luxuriating in blissful ignorance.

  Besides the usual international crises, the top echelons of the military and civilian policymakers were still trying to formulate America’s response to the shape of the post-Communist world. The world had changed almost overnight, yet change was the bureaucracy’s worst enemy, the crisis to which it had the most difficulty responding.

  This morning Jake Grafton thought about change. The knee-jerk reaction had been to reorganize, to draw more lines on the organization chart. That had been easy, though it hadn’t been enough. The brave new world had to be faced whether the policymakers were comfortable or not.

  They were uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Men and women who had spent their adult lives as warriors of the cold war now had to face the unknown without experience or perspective. Mistakes were inevitable, grievous mistakes that were going to cost people their reputations, their careers. This sense of dangerous uncertainty collided with the extraordinary dynamics of the evolving geopolitical landscape to produce a stress-filled crisis atmosphere in which tension was almost tangible.

  This situation is like war, Jake Grafton decided. Every change in the international scene reveals a new opportunity to the bold few and a new pitfall to the cautious many.

  He was musing along these lines when the Pentagon came into view. It was a low, sprawling building much larger than it looked.

  As he parked the car he was wondering if there was any place at all for nuclear weapons in this changing world. Were they obsolete, like horse cavalry and battleships? He also wondered if he was the only person in the Pentagon asking that question.

  “Everyone would have been better off if Russia had had another revolution and shot all the Communists.”

  General Albert Sidney Brown delivered himself of this opinion and stopped the strategy conference dead. Which was perhaps what he intended. The subject was the growth of virulent anti-Semitism in the former Soviet states.

  “General,” CIA deputy director Harvey Schenler said wearily, “I don’t believe fantasies of that type contribute much to our deliberations.”

  Brown snorted. “Most of the problems the new regimes in eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union are now facing were caused by the Communists’ grotesque mismanagement, incompetent central planning, believing their own propaganda, lying to everybody, including themselves, cheating, bribery, favoritism—the list goes on for a couple dozen pages. Now that the Commies have become the political opposition, they’re preaching hatred of the Jews, trying to blame them for the collapse of the whole rotten system. It’s 1932 in Germany all over again. Now you people in the CIA seem to think that if the Communists ge
t back in power, in some magical way this nuclear weapons control problem will just disappear. Bullshit!”

  Schenler’s tone sharpened. “I think you owe me and my staff an apology, General. We have said no such thing here.”

  “You’ve implied it. You just stated that we have to keep our lines of communication open to the Commies, treat them as legitimate contenders for power.”

  “We’re not suggesting the United States should aid their return to power.”

  Brown cleared his throat explosively. “Then I apologize. I’ve become so used to double-talk and new age quack-speak from you people, I’m easily confused. Perhaps today we can dispense with the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and get down to brass tacks.”

  Schenler paused for several seconds as he looked at the page before him. He had an apology and a challenge. He decided to accept the apology and return to the agenda items.

  Brown’s outburst was the only bright spot in the meeting, Jake Grafton found to his sorrow. These weekly strategy sessions, “strategizing” the civilian intelligence professionals called it, were usually exercises in tedium. Today was no exception. No facts were briefed that hadn’t already circulated through the upper echelons. Most of what ended up on the table were policy options from CIA analysts, career researchers who were theoretically politically neutral. Jake Grafton didn’t believe it—the only politically neutral people he had ever met were dead.

  So the items discussed here were really policy alternatives that had made their long, tortuous way through the intestines of the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most monolithic bureaucracy left on the planet. Like General Brown, Jake Grafton looked at these nuggets without enthusiasm. Larded with dubious predictions and carefully chosen facts, these policy alternatives were really the choices the upper echelons of the CIA wanted the policymakers to adopt. The researchers gave their bosses what they thought the bosses wanted to hear, or so Brown and Grafton believed.

  Alas, these two uniformed officers well knew they couldn’t change the system. So they listened and recorded their objections.

  Schenler sometimes argued. Most of the time he just took notes. Grafton never saw the notes. About fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and an ivy league education, Schenler was an organization man to his fingertips. “I’ll bet the bastard hasn’t farted in twenty-five years,” General Brown once grumbled to Jake.

  Jake also took occasional notes at these soirees, doodled and watched Schenler and his lieutenants perform the usual rituals.

  Today, when he finally concluded that General Brown had given up, he went back to doodling. He used his pencil to doctor up his copy of a reproduction of a current Russian anti-Semitic poster that had been handed around before Brown fired his salvo. The crude drawing depicted two rich Jews—they had to be Jews: guys with hooked noses wearing yarmulkes—counting their money while starving women and children watched. In one corner a man with a red star on his cap observed the scene. Jake penciled a swastika on his chest.

  “What is this?” Jake held up a piece of paper and waved it at Toad Tarkington.

  “Ah, Admiral, if you could give me a little hint…”

  “You put this here, didn’t you?”

  Jake Grafton had been going through his morning mail pile when he ran across Toad’s masterpiece, a summary of everything in the computer about the demise of Nigel Keren. It was short, only one page, but pithy, full of facts. Toad knew the admiral was partial to facts.

  “Oh,” Toad said when Jake held the paper out so he could see it, “that’s just a little thing I put together for your information.”

  The admiral stared at him with humor. “I know everything I want to know about Nigel Keren.”

  Toad had rehearsed this, but looking at Jake Grafton, his little speech went out the window. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely.

  “I know how he was killed,” the admiral said.

  Toad gawked.

  The admiral put the paper on the desk in front of him and toyed with it. “A publishing mogul alone on a large yacht, no one aboard but him and twelve crew members, all male. The ship is three days out of the Canaries when he eats dinner alone—the same food that all the crew was served—and spends the rest of the evening walking the deck, then goes to his stateroom. The next morning the crew can’t find him aboard. Two days later his nude body is found floating in the sea. A Spanish pathologist found no evidence of violence, no water in the lungs, no heart disease, no burst blood vessels in the brain, no evidence of suffocation. In short, the man died a natural death and his corpse somehow went into the sea. None of the crew members knows anything. All deny that they killed him.”

  When Jake fell silent Toad added, “Then his media empire broke up. Apparently large sums of money, hundreds of millions, may have been taken. If anyone knows, they aren’t saying. Keren’s son says the deceased father just made too many leveraged deals and the worldwide recession caught them short.”

  The admiral merely grunted.

  “Perhaps there was a stowaway aboard the yacht,” Toad suggested. “Or a small vessel rendezvoused with the yacht and an assassin team came aboard.”

  “No. The British checked with every ship in the vicinity and interrogated the crew thoroughly. And if he was assassinated, how was it done?”

  “You tell me,” Tarkington muttered.

  “Remember that top secret CIA progress report that went through here a couple of months ago on the development of binary chemicals?”

  Toad nodded once.

  “When I saw it then, I thought of the Keren case,” Jake Grafton continued, “but I forgot all about it until the other day when I was staring at that photo Judith Farrell donated to the cause. And I confess, I used the computer yesterday after you left to reread the Keren file.” He smiled at Toad. “It would have occurred to you sooner or later.”

  “Binary chemicals.”

  “That’s right. The poisons of the past—arsenic, strychnine, that kind of thing—all had a couple of major drawbacks. If given in sufficient quantity to do the job they killed very quickly, before the killer had a chance to leave the scene of the crime. And there was always the problem of killing too many people, anyone who ingested the poisoned food or drink. Binary chemicals remove those drawbacks. You give your victim one chemical, harmless in itself, perhaps serve it in the punch at a party. Everyone drinks it and no one is the wiser. It’s absorbed by the tissues and so remains in the body for a lengthy period, at least several weeks. But it’s benign, produces no ill effect. Then at a later date the assassin serves the other half of the poison, also quite benign by itself. And the second half of the brew combines with the first half in the body of the victim and becomes a deadly poison. The victim goes home and goes to bed and the chemical reaction takes place and his heart stops. No one will suspect poison. Even if they do, investigation will reveal that everything the victim ate and drank was also ingested by other people.”

  Jake Grafton turned his hand over.

  “So Keren could have been given the first drink of the chemical at any time in the preceding few weeks,” Toad said.

  “Correct. At a party, a luncheon, a dinner, whatever. It could have been in anything he ate or drank. And that everyone else ate or drank.”

  “Then aboard ship…”

  “The second chemical could have been in the food when it came aboard, maybe in the ship’s water tank. Probably the food, which would be consumed or thrown away. When Keren had ingested a sufficient dosage and chemical reaction was complete, his heart stopped. And no one aboard the ship knew anything about it. They were all innocent.”

  “Wouldn’t this stuff still be in his body?” Toad asked.

  “Probably. If the pathologist had known what to look for. Zero chance of that.”

  “But why did the body go into the water?”

  “That’s a side issue,” Jake Grafton said. “Nothing in life is ever neat and tidy. Someone panicked when they found him dead. You can make your own list of reasons. Maybe
the British found out who threw him overboard and kept quiet to protect the dead man’s reputation. Extraordinarily wealthy man, pillar of the community, why smear him after he’s dead? The British think like that.”

  “But later they said Keren committed suicide. That’s certainly frowned on by the upper crust.”

  “If you have a corpse floating in the ocean and no proof of murder, what would you call it?”

  “He was a Jew from the Levant,” Toad said carefully.

  “Emigrated to Britain as a young man. Poor as a church mouse.”

  “Then he made hundreds of millions and the Mossad was right there when he died to snap a photo of a CIA agent. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Toad said, eyeing the admiral.

  “Not me,” Jake Grafton said with finality. “I have no reason to go prying into someone else’s dirty little business. And no levers to pry with even if I were foolish enough to try.” He tossed Toad’s summary at him. “Put this into the burn bag and let’s get back to work.”

  On Friday evening Jake took Callie and Amy to a movie. Afterward they stopped for ice cream. It was a little after eleven before Amy wheeled the car into the driveway and killed the engine. Jake got out of the passenger seat and held the rear door open for Callie.

  “Well, Mom, what’d’ya think?” Amy asked.

  “You drive too fast.”

  “I do not! Do I, Dad?”

  “Wasn’t that a great movie?” said Jake Grafton.

  “Dad!” Amy exclaimed in anguish. “Don’t avoid the issue. Oooh, I just hate it when you do that!”

  From the porch—this rambling three-story brick built in the 1920s still had its porch—Jake waved to the federal protective service guard standing on the corner under the light, then opened the door with his key.